Apple OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks (for Mac)

Powerful yet unobtrusive notification panel that includes iMessage sending. Tight integration with iOS 7. Clean, convenient UI. New power-management and security features. Intuitive new features like a tabbed Finder and color-coded tags. Maps and iBooks give OS X nearly all the features of iOS.

Cons
Minor inconsistencies in deep features like keyboard shortcuts. New color-coded tag feature lacks some conveniences.

Bottom Line

OS X remains the best consumer-level desktop operating system, despite Microsoft's impressive catch-up in Windows 8.1. Newly included apps, automatic app updates, better laptop power management, tight integration with social media, and unified notifications are just a few of Mavericks' highlights.

The tag feature is terrific for keeping track of all the files related to a single project, no matter where they are, but it still lacks at least one important convenience: If you select some files that all have the same tag, but are not all in the same folder, you can't create a ZIP archive of the selected files from the Finder's Ctrl-click menu, as you can when you select multiple files that are all in the same folder. There's no obvious reason for omitting this ability when selecting files with the same tag in multiple folders, and it took me less than a minute to create a "service" in OS X's Automator app that added that exact ability to the Ctrl-click menu—creating a menu item that made a ZIP archive of multiple files and saved the archive to the desktop.

Other improvements include better use of multiple monitors, with a desktop and dock on each display, removing the old annoyance of configuring one monitor as primary. An app can run full-screen on one monitor while the desktop runs on another—exactly as you can already do with a single monitor where you switch between two or more desktops, with the difference that you can now see all the desktops at once.

Managing Power, Staying SecureMavericks' hidden improvements include "App Nap," a feature that gives less CPU time to apps that aren't the front-most window, but is smart enough to kick in only when the app isn't doing anything useful like playing music or videos. Memory management automatically compresses the least-recently-used memory so that current operations get more room to work in. Also, OS X can decompress compressed memory much faster than it can retrieve data saved to disk, which is what OS X used to do with data that it needed to swap out of RAM. One side effect is that a Mac now wakes from sleep much faster than before.

Speaking of sleep, one slightly unsettling change is that the power button a Mac laptop now instantly puts the machine to sleep when you press it. If you want the familiar menu that lets you restart, sleep, or shut down, you need to press Ctrl-Power or choose an option from the Apple menu.

New security features won't get in the way of most users, but advanced users will notice some differences and possibly some inconveniences. In the past, a single setting in OS X allowed applications to click buttons and choose menu items as if you had clicked them by hand. Now every application that wants access to these "User Interface elements" has to get specific permission from the user, and a few third-party apps will need to be rewritten to accommodate this change. A few special-purpose apps that I've written using OS X's built-in AppleScript automation features needed some rewriting before they would work under Mavericks, and if you're one of the few people who use out-of-the-way apps written by amateur developers like me, you may want to hold off upgrading to Mavericks until the developers update their apps. This warning only applies to a tiny percentage of OS X users, however.

Time to Upgrade?Once again, Mavericks shows that Apple has an uncanny ability to add a fine polish to its desktop operating system without alienating longtime users—a lesson that chief competitor Microsoft is still struggling with in Windows 8.1. OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks is the feature-richest, most convenience-filled, and slickest consumer-level operating system on the planet. If you're using a Mac, I heartily recommend you install this free upgrade. If not, it might be a good idea to get yourself to an Apple store to at least see what you're missing.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael...

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